Cecil's Home Improvement

A few months ago I acquired a puppy, a half-beagle, half-boxer, who so far in his young life has survived being raised partially by cats (my own, who have remote experience with another exuberant half-beagle who wandered blindly--literally; he was blind for the first couple of months of his life--into our lives) who recognize that a puppy genuinely needs the kind of guidance that only caring cats can provide, and who recognize also that the house biped--that would be me--is probably the world’s worst disciplinarian when it comes to puppies and most other critters.

At the moment, Cecil, the puppy, is working diligently on one of his house makeover projects, this one involving dismantling my old bed so we can get a new one in here. When he first came to live with us at age 7 weeks, he could reach only the fabric on the bottom of the box springs, but with much effort and perseverance, he managed to destroy that. He grew taller, of course, and so could reach the fabric around the sides of the springs and remove THAT. Now he has begun to work on the wooden frame itself, but these days he is large enough that he can go about it more comfortably, lying on his back, hind legs flailing happily about in the air while he grabs the frame with his front paws and gnaws mightily away at it.

If the project maintains his interest, he’ll be working on the mattress next, and I suppose by Christmas or thereabouts I’ll have to go bed-shopping. Well, heck, it’s not like I don’t need one--this one looks like it has been gnawed apart by a dog!

Since Cecil began the project, I’ve gone from being slightly annoyed to more or less indifferent to fascinated, and now I’m wondering, not quite to the point of making bets with myself, when he will achieve his clear goal of rendering the bed “uninhabitable.” I have no doubt that he will get there--he has overcome worse obstacles, from cats to two older, much larger dogs who found him initially unbearable, to a recent bout with parvovirus that really should have killed him.

Another of Cecil’s home-improvement plans involves excavating the yard, presumably in preparation for reseeding so that he’ll have a more plush and green playground next summer. The yard is large and Cecil is not, but then again, the bed is quite a bit larger than he is, too, and what is it they say about one’s reach exceeding their grasp? Anyway, he’s making progress on the lawn, as well. He is not going about it quite so methodically as a farmer tackling a 500-acre field, one swath after another, the individual swaths of plowed or planted or harvested territory accumulating in a steady, inexorable march from one side of the field to the other. Cecil is more of a “spot-excavater:” He’ll dig a nice deep hole in one spot, then rush off to another, more interesting spot and dig a nice hole there, then maybe chase one of the older dogs for a while, then go back to his labors in still another corner of the lawn. Unless frozen ground stops him for a while, by Spring he may indeed have the lawn plowed up and ready for reseeding--and free of moles, as well.

There may or may not be a lesson somewhere in there as I go about this uncomfortable business of reinventing myself, whether it be in Cecil’s clear self-identification of a goal, his spending at least a little time every day working towards that goal, or simply the sheer joy with which he goes about his work.

In the meantime, I’ll just keep watching him and maybe go price some beds and look at grass seeds and seeders.